


your slaughterhouse, your killing floor

by Verbyna



Series: all just trying to be holy [3]
Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, Thor (Movies)
Genre: Entropy, M/M, Ragnarok
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-31
Updated: 2014-05-31
Packaged: 2018-01-27 20:02:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,017
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1720829
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Verbyna/pseuds/Verbyna
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Take heart. You always learn, even if you’re never grateful.</p>
            </blockquote>





	your slaughterhouse, your killing floor

**Author's Note:**

> Two years down the line, here's the final installment of my Siken-titled Loki/Tony oneshot series. The stories are standalone, but they're ordered chronologically from Loki and Tony's childhoods to Ragnarok.
> 
> Many thanks to FelicityGS for letting me type this at her and for the feedback, and to theviolonist for the beta.

_Trust me,_ Loki says, and swallows fire.

 _Trust me,_ Tony says, and falls quietly from the sky.

They smile through it. No one sees it, but they both know it’s there; they trust it more than words, more than fear, more than they trust themselves.

*

Tony knows all about the angels’ share. You never get as much as you put in, even if the result is more than the sum of its parts. He doesn’t like to think about entropy, everything moving further apart, but he went to a distillery when he was sixteen and learned the lesson despite himself.

“Everything that begins must end,” Loki tells him. “Everything began. Everything must end.”

“Is that how you justify dying?” Tony asks without looking away from the graphite sheet simulation on the main screen. “You’re not even here.”

Loki walks through the table and comes to stand in front of Tony, illusion wavering just enough to make him a ghost. Tony can’t help but look at him and wonder where he is. He doesn’t think about what Loki’s doing now that he’s so absolutely, terrifyingly free.

“I’m everywhere,” Loki lies, looking Tony straight in the eye. “I’m at the end of all things and I’m singing my antimatter twin awake. I’m everything I could’ve been if no choices had been made. And I’m nothing, because my existence was a choice.”

“A beginning,” Tony says, sarcasm falling flat.

He’s never seen pity on Loki’s face before.

*

It starts small. Jane Foster puts out the word that all is not alright, but no one takes her seriously unless she’s bending spacetime as punctuation.

It starts small, and it spreads.

Tony has no way to contact Loki, so he can’t ask him why shadows are deeper. The air grows thinner, and he begins to hold his breath before anyone else.

Even in the city, they see enough of the stars to know when they’re blinking out.

*

Loki is in Tony’s bed, and he’s burning up. He should be cold to the touch, but Tony knows he’ll wake up with blisters on his forehead and his hands and everywhere their contact lingered. He used to play with hot water when he was a kid, let his skin turn red and tender and cooled it against the edge of the sink like he’s doing now with the sheets. Behind him, Loki isn’t violent enough to make this normal.

“Can’t you at least pretend?” Tony exhales.

“What would you have me be?” Loki asks, and his voice should echo. “Would you have me pretend this time is like the others? That time has meaning, if only to soothe you? Take heart. You always learn, even if you’re never grateful.”

It’s not the angels’ share when Tony gasps for breath. It’s painful, his lungs are straining, he’s falling apart, and when Loki disappears, he leaves behind a bracelet on Tony’s wrist and one of the Iron Man suits that Tony destroyed in the corner of the room.

Tony takes it apart and puts it back together, but he never takes the bracelet off. He remembers one just like it, first time he met Loki, how scared he was. How ready. There’s no enemy this time, just Loki’s ghost and Loki’s body and the howling void at the edge of everything, drawing nearer every day.

In mythology there was a battle. It’s not fair, he thinks. It’s not fucking fair that he can’t even lose.

*

They come to him one by one until the tower is full of former Avengers, all dressed up for a fight that can’t be fought. Bucky Barnes moves in with Steve and Tony can’t help but wonder how many times they have to die in front of each other before the universe strikes them down to make a point.

He’s never seen Bruce so calm before. “What do you think I was meditating about?” he shrugs, never as much of a monster as he is to Tony right then. “This is the only way I’ll die.”

Sam Wilson is still making jokes. No one dares not to laugh at them.

*

Loki comes again, and this time he’s blue and red and he bites into Tony with sharp teeth right where his arc reactor used to be.

“It’s always you,” he says, making his way down. “You shouldn’t exist, I shouldn’t have a reason to come back and finish this,” and he’s so torn under his shaky expressions that Tony pulls him up to wipe the blood off his mouth and kiss him.

“I know,” Tony tells him later. Or maybe he says it before they start, before he really understands what Loki’s trying not to tell him, ignoring the black holes closing in and the way he can’t bring himself to miss the warmth. “I know. This wasn’t a choice.”

*

By Jane’s estimations, they have two days left.

“No regrets,” Pepper tells Tony, and he nods at her, lying.

*

“What would you do if we weren’t all starting at the beginning again?”

Loki’s little more than shadow now, a blur that hurts the eyes. He’s wrapped around Tony like a fine, heavy mist. A dust storm in slow-motion, or too fast to follow.

Tony looks at his dead monitors, the empty space where his projections should be, and can’t choose an answer. “Everything,” he whispers. “Everything I’ve been doing. And everything I could’ve done.”

“Started a revolution? Taken your people to the stars? Had a child, perhaps?”

“Not the last one.”

“It’s easier to start a civil war than raise a person,” Loki says, like a concession. He hums. “You never have children. Sometimes you marry her, or leave Midgard to fight with stranger companions, but you never--”

“Maybe next time.”

Loki laughs, loud and barely there. “I think not. Come, I saved the best view for us both.”

(There is no bang; there is no whimper. There’s just Loki, and he’s a black hole, only solid where he takes Tony’s blistered wrist to lead him off the edge of the world, the last two living things before life starts over.)


End file.
